ashes in the river wind

Synopsis – Ashes in the Riverwind Genre: Slow Fantasy / Character-Driven Mystery / Soft Magic In the mist-laden valley of Thornepass, life drips by like water through moss: slow, steady, and tangled in silence. The village of Edenrock is old—not grand, not poor, just old. Its people live close to the soil and closer still to each other’s secrets. They hold festivals for the changing fruit. They write poems in the bark of birch trees. And though the world outside has shifted—grown louder, hungrier, more mechanical—Edenrock remains untouched, or so its residents would like to believe. Then comes Nerin, a pale stranger with scholar’s hands and a satchel of half-scorched journals. He claims to be a traveling apprentice-scribe, assigned to copy the local stories and dialects. But his silences stretch a little too long, his gaze lingers a little too much on the half-buried stone obelisks, and his dreams seem too vivid for a man who sleeps so little. Still, no one pays him much mind. The Festival of Stonefruit is approaching, and there are tents to mend, bread to bake, and gossip to spread. The real story does not begin with Nerin. It begins with a toothless dog that keeps digging in the orchard. It begins with a little girl who draws dreams she should not remember. It begins with water that tastes faintly of ash, and a wind that carries words no one speaks anymore. Ashes in the Riverwind is not about saving the world. It is about noticing the slow rot in the walls before they fall. It is about people whose lives are so quiet, they barely hear themselves unraveling. Magic, if it exists, does not announce itself. It hums beneath the floorboards. Some things in Edenrock were never buried deep enough.